Opinion: Macron’s choices will show if he’s smart or just lucky

After his whirlwind victory in the French presidential election, Emmanuel Macron is widely viewed as both smart and lucky. His next choices will show whether he really is smart, or maybe just very lucky so far.

On Thursday, Macron’s party unveiled the candidates to run on the ticket of the newly renamed La République en Marche (Republic on the Move) in the two-round legislative elections next month. Getting sufficient support in Parliament is critical if Macron is to implement the program of political and economic renewal he promised.

Although Macron won the second round of the presidential vote in an apparent landslide — getting 66% of votes cast to Marine Le Pen’s 34% — the victory is far less compelling when the 36% of eligible voters who abstained or voided their ballots are factored in and the fact that more than half of those voting for Macron, according to one poll, did so primarily to block Le Pen.

What is unknown is how ready French voters are to give Macron the parliamentary majority he needs to govern by electing his largely untested slate of candidates.

The initial list presented this week had candidates for 428 of the constituencies and the party intends to field a candidate in all 577.

Men and women were at exact parity, 214 each, even though 71% of the 19,000 applications were from men and 29% from women. Slightly more than half those selected, 52%, have never held elective office and 95% are not currently in Parliament. The average age is 46, with the youngest being 24 and the oldest 72.

Macron has said he will announce his choice for prime minister, who actually runs the government in France’s hybrid presidential-parliamentary system, after his inauguration as president on Sunday.

There are rumors that he is considering Christine Lagarde, managing director for the International Monetary Fund and a former French finance minister, for the post.

It would be a baffling choice, and not very smart on the face of it. For starters, it would be a strange way to show voters still skeptical about Macron’s bona fides that the former Rothschild banker is not a puppet of international finance. As head of the IMF, Lagarde is the very face of international finance.

Equally important, regardless of how much prestige Lagarde has internationally, in French terms she would hardly mark a break with politics of the past.

Not only was Lagarde part of center-right President Nicolas Sarkozy’s government, she was convicted last year of negligence in allowing businessman Bernard Tapie, a supporter of the president, to collect nearly half a billion dollars from French taxpayers after he sued over the government’s controversial role in the sale of his stake in Adidas.

Since no penalties were imposed, most foreigners have simply ignored this slap on the wrist. French voters might not be so forgiving. The nearly half billion dollars awarded to Tapie on her watch make the money former Prime Minister François Fillon paid to his family for no-show jobs look like a bagatelle, though he paid dearly for it in his loss last month in the first round of presidential voting.

Finally, the French have a proprietary feeling about the IMF post and it is highly unlikely Lagarde’s replacement would be French if she joined Macron as the head of his government.

After Macron’s party said this week it had rejected the application of former Socialist Prime Minister Manuel Valls to run on its ticket because that wouldn’t square with the goal of renewing French politics, it would be a curious choice indeed to pick someone as linked to the old guard as Lagarde.

Macron would not have to be too smart to pass her over for someone less prestigious but burdened with less baggage. Nonetheless, Lagarde is being touted by the French press as the “most popular” choice after she registered a whopping 13% in one poll, ahead of 12% for second-place Jean-Louis Borloo, another former member of Sarkozy’s cabinet.

As a former Socialist, Macron may feel like he has the vote of moderate leftist voters in his pocket and needs to reach out to the center-right in his choice of prime minister. This might be taking too much for granted.

Polls taken before Macron presented his list show his party getting about a quarter of the vote in the first round. Other groupings in France’s fragmented electorate are about equal, with leftist Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s Unbowed France and the Socialists together getting about a quarter; the center-right led by the Republicans, another quarter; and Marine Le Pen’s right-wing National Front and allies, another quarter.

What really counts, of course, is who gets into the second round and who comes out on top in that vote.

Candidates who get a majority of the votes cast in the June 11 first round and equal to at least 25% of registered voters win outright. Otherwise, all those who get at least 12.5% of the votes cast go into the runoff vote the following week (or the top two if only one or none meet that threshold) and whoever gets the most votes is elected.

One poll of the 535 constituencies in mainland France projected Macron’s party getting 249 to 286 seats, against 289 needed for a majority, and the Republicans and allies, 200 to 210, leaving the left and the right with just a couple dozen seats each.

But this is an unprecedented situation in French politics and no one really knows what will happen. His success at navigating these uncharted waters will give us an idea of just how smart Macron is.

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